Former Staff

TLC: LordSilent

Testers: Rivalee, arisu

History

We started out as two guys (BlackDragonHunt and Ritobito) studying Japanese who stumbled onto a Danganronpa trailer in January of 2011, started playing with not much more than a passing interest, and then had completely fallen in love by the time we were done. Mostly out of curiosity, BDH started poking around in the game’s archives to see if he could get at the data, but he didn’t have much luck. Every so often, he would come back to it and start prodding at the data a bit more, but it wasn’t until the sequel–Super Danganronpa 2–was announced that August that he actually gave it a serious shot. That was August 3, 2011 (or August 2 in the US).

That very same day, BDH had a basic extractor built, and by 11 PM on August 3, he had successfully inserted the first line of English text into the demo. It snowballed from there, BDH picking through the game’s data and sharing his findings with Ritobito, who was getting pumped at the prospect of an opportunity to bring this outstanding game to an English-speaking audience.

We got to work pretty much right away, splitting translation duties roughly 50/50. It was bumpy at first, because we’d never done anything like this before. Plus, the game stores text separate from the control codes used to display it, so–short of having the game up alongside us as we worked (which we did for a while)–we were mostly translating blind. But, as time passed and we figured out more of the game’s file formats, our tools evolved, leaving less room for guesswork and more room for real work.

By early September, we had fully translated and edited the demo, leaving only a few scattered images left to take care of. It was around that time that BDH got the idea to create a visual editor to streamline the process, so he got to work on that. With the demo completed and the script editor under construction, we decided it would probably be prudent to sit on the demo for the time being and hold off on a release until we were closer to done with the full game. It didn’t seem wise to put a demo out there when we had no guarantee we would even make it all the way through the colossal, nearly one-million character script. (By way of comparison, the demo has ~54,000 characters of text, roughly half of which isn’t even used.)

We officially started translating the full game on November 17, 2011, and we brought LordSilent into the fold late January. Again, the road was bumpy, because not only were we still new to this whole translation stuff, none of us had ever worked on a project of this scale. After some fumbling, we realized that having everyone do everything wasn’t going to work, so we split the roles, with BDH doing translation, Ritobito editing, and LordSilent translation checking. After that, things started moving a lot smoother, with more, consistent progress being made.